Social change in developmental times? On ‘changeability’ and the uneven timings of child welfare interventions

Introduction

In discussing (hetero)normative time and its timings, the queer theorist and feminist scholar Jack Halberstam uses the expression ‘there is a time and place for everything’ (2005: 7). Normative time may connect to certain prescribed timings in a linear life trajectory or what is thought to be central milestones in a human life, like marriage and ‘biological clocks’, denoting reproduction in heteronormative time (Halberstam, 2005). In the context of childhoods, however, ‘timing childhoods’ (Tesar, 2016: 407) means drawing strict lines between linearly ordered and irreversible life ‘stages’, such as in the developmentalist approach to childhood or distinctions between childhood and adulthood (Halberstam, 2005; Woodhead, 1999). The notion of timing helps to imagine something being timely but also, conversely, the possibility of a poor timing—something occurring too late or prematurely (Andersen and Bengtsson, 2019; Halberstam, 2005; Knezevic, 2012). The notion of timing not only captures the normative and timely but also those considered not to be in line with, or are altogether outside, normative time. Those temporally othered have historically been subjected to various programmes, namely, ‘progressive’ interventions, ‘civilising’, and other ‘corrective’ missions (Fabian, 2014; see also Castañeda, 2015; McClintock, 1995; Woodhead, 1999).

In this article, I analytically juxtapose timings of child welfare recommendations to remove children from home with the temporalities of child welfare, including their timings and deviations from the norm. This article is based on a critical interrogation of child welfare assessment reports from a Swedish social services department. The assessment reports exemplify different timings of protection of children.

From having been described as ‘Kinder Gulag’ and a child welfare and protection system that, in the gaze of other systems, seemed to lead to too frequent interventions (Cocozza and Hort, 2011), today researchers discuss how interventions in Swedish child welfare take place as a ‘reactive outcome’ to long ongoing problems (Leviner, 2014: 217; Östberg, 2010). Research about the Swedish child welfare services describes cautious approaches or not intervening soon enough (Cocozza and Hort, 2011; Leviner, 2014; Linell, 2017; Östberg, 2010). Thus, in parallel with more recent advocacy for early interventions in child welfare (see Featherstone et al., 2014; Wilson, 2002, for overviews), the temporal terminology used in Swedish social work and child welfare scholarship illustrates a scepticism among the social workers against compulsory care as a solution. Such scepticism, it is claimed, postpones compulsory care as long as possible (Ponnert, 2007). The common denominator of the aforementioned debates is the implicit questioning of the timings of child welfare interventions. Research shows that child welfare responds to visibly injured, physically and/or developmentally damaged, or ‘psychosomatically suffering’ children (Knezevic, 2020a: 235). In this article, I argue that time is of essence for these signs to become visible and embodied.

Prior research also offers insightful analyses of the profession and its conditions, such as time pressures and constraints (Holland, 2011; Roberts, 2017; White, 1998). Scholars also address care trajectories (Enell and Denvall, 2017; Pösö and Eronen, 2015), temporal discourses in social work, and temporal structuring of child welfare and protection practice (Fahlgren, 2009; Juhila et al., 2015; Pösö, 2018; White, 1998; Yuill and Mueller-Hirth, 2019). Also addressed are the timings and temporalities of care and support (Pösö and Eronen, 2015; Roberts, 2017), including from the perspective of young people (Andersen and Bengtsson, 2019; Pösö et al., 2018). However important, these contributions pay little or no attention to how various temporal discourses are mobilised in relation to different clients. Of particular interest is to highlight in this article what these conceptions mean in assessments of different situations and people. The study sheds light on some implications of modernity and ‘travelling’ ideas with universal claims, that is theories on development1 that inform many contemporary Western child welfare and protection systems, hence, may be of relevance for contexts other than Sweden and child welfare agencies. This applies in particular to the study’s exploration of timing as an analytical tool for grasping processes of differentiation and othering based on age, class, gender, migration status, race, and health/able-bodiedness as axes of power. As such, it adds to previous temporal analyses of child welfare and social work (Fahlgren, 2009; Holland, 2011; Pösö, 2018; Roberts, 2017; White, 1998). Considering that child welfare interventions are a way to enforce change in children’s lives, where ‘socially desirable change’ and changeability in situations or behaviours are desired but are assessed as not possible to happen otherwise (e.g. Fahlgren, 2009: 225; White, 1998), the aim is also to provide an analysis of some contextual, institutional, and temporal conceptions of societal change.

In the next section, I briefly contextualise the material and present the methodological approaches used. This is followed by a theoretical section in which I present some theoretical contributions on temporality, primarily from queer theory, postcolonial theory, and critical childhood studies. In this section, I link to social change as a central notion in social work. The analysis is divided into two main sections: one, giving a broad overview of time and temporality in child welfare and protection practice and the other focusing on social change from a temporal perspective. Finally, I present some concluding remarks.

Temporal terminologies of child welfare practice

Temporal themes are not only present in research but also in the material used in this study. During readings of the assessment reports from a Swedish municipal social services department that suggest out-of-home placements of children, I found temporal markers to be central. Phrases such as permanent, temporary, and inclined to changes (here referred to as changeability [sv. förändringsbenägenhet]) were commonly present in assessments of situations and parenting. Moreover, the aforementioned pattern of long ongoing assessments was recognised, and questions arose about the various ways in which these circumstances differ from those labelled as emergency cases. This, in turn, lead to a more profound interest in the temporal dimensions of child welfare, and a temporality-inspired thematic analysis emerged, focusing in particular on conceptions of change.

This study2 has emerged in a larger research context foregrounding matters surrounding various forms of differentiations of children and childhoods (Knezevic, 2020b). The framework for the analysis below is guided by readings of the empirical material and critical scholarship on differentiation and othering, mainly the queer theory, postcolonial theory, and critical childhood studies. Drawing on critical scholarship means that time, temporality, and timing are approached as socially constructed and normative rather than value neutral.

Throughout the study, I refer to the Swedish child welfare and protection system and ‘child welfare assessment reports’ or ‘case reports’ as the ‘cases’ which suggest out-of-home placements, also called care order applications. In Sweden, these are either regulated by the Care of Young Persons Act (Lag med särskilda bestämmelser om vård av unga, 1990: 52) and compulsory care, commonly referred to as ‘child protection’ in other parts of the world, or the Social Services Act (Socialtjänstlag, 2001: 453) as a voluntary measure. However, the level of voluntarism is contested within the field when it comes to out-of-home placements. In this study, I include both grounds for removals and refer to them as child welfare. The translated excerpts in the analysis below are taken as examples from an analysis of 13 assessment reports that all closed in 2015 and address six different families and 10 children in the age group 0–12 years. The case reports are guided by BBIC (Barns Behov i Centrum, in English ‘Children’s Needs in Focus’), a framework for assessment, and the so-called BBIC triangle, a visible guideline of the three main areas that ought to be assessed by social work practitioners: child development, parenting capacity, and family and environment (National Board of Health and Welfare, 2018).

Throughout the analytical process, consideration was paid to the assessments as temporal processes. For instance I paid attention to cases where there was previous contact with social services, as the cases at hand illustrate what was previously tolerated and what was no longer. As noted by Susan White in her analysis of child welfare, ‘[t]he classification of cases as either “urgent” or “routine” is an essentially temporal act’ (1998: 64). To grasp different timings of intervention, that is immediacy versus longevity, I contrasted immediate removals from the parents or home with case reports assessing children more than once, the so-called long ongoing cases. Below, I address some central temporal themes that are of relevance in the assessments of problems and changeability. Because changeability was confined to the assessment of parents, parenting became a focus of the analysis. Assessments of children were foremost linking to development and are more fully examined elsewhere (Knezevic, forthcoming; see also Burman, 2017; Castañeda, 2002, 2015; White, 1998).

Finally, I included only cases addressing what in the social theory could be equivalent to structural problems, that is different forms of violence and abuse of a continuous and repetitive nature (cf. Hearn, 1998). This has been important when trying to capture how social services deal with structural social problems and their solutions and, in a broader perspective, societal change. For this reason, the analysis focuses on cases dealing with similar issues that nevertheless differ in response. Consequently, the study does not give an overview of the various complexities that these cases may include.

The analysis below is organised thematically and covers overall two main areas: time as a vulnerability factor in assessments of children and parent’s changeability. Although this study does not primarily focus on assessments of children, I, nevertheless, include both parts, as they together better illustrate a relational analysis and how assessments of children interconnect with assessments of parents, as well as the nuances of uneven timings of intervention. The subheadings address the identified temporal markers of temporary versus permanent, longevity, futurity, chronicity, and fixity. I also discuss more broadly some implications of these temporal logics when it comes to perspectives on social problems and social change. When possible, I try to contrast different timings of interventions or discuss differentiations in other ways, that is in relation to axes of power. However, the reason why the differentiations based on age, gender, health status, race, and migration status are not fully explored in this study is that making these differentiations visible involves an ethical challenge and a difficulty in maintaining confidentiality. Therefore, in addition to using pseudonyms, alterations to age, gender, and family constellation are made in cases where this is not the focus of the analysis.

Timings of development and social change

As already mentioned, the notion of timing evokes ideas that something is timely but also of poor timing—occurring too late or prematurely (Andersen and Bengtsson, 2019; Halberstam, 2005; Knezevic, 2012). This relies on a conception of time as moving and accentuates specific flows (tempo) beyond perceived fast pace or stagnation (Knezevic, 2012). It also highlights events that serve to confirm how one is going in the ‘right’ direction on a prescribed life path (Andersen and Bengtsson, 2019; Halberstam, 2005; Tesar, 2016). The notion of timing, thus, makes visible the normative and the expected. Yet, in a similar manner, it pinpoints when delays occur (right place but wrong time) or when not being on the right track (right time but wrong place).

There is a lot written about ‘timing childhoods’ (Tesar, 2016: 407). The construction of children as formative and childhood as consisting of stages of development makes the generic child crucial for much theorising about modernity and progress as well as social formation and change (Burman, 2017; Castañeda, 2002). Critical childhood studies point out how children, as research objects, are displaced from their own childhoods and instead are interesting ‘for what they revealed about the sources and origins of humankind in general’ or the future adulthood (James, 2011: 35). Because these meanings are ascribed to childhood, children become susceptible to various ‘corrections’ (Woodhead, 1999) and thus to interventions aimed at ‘timing’, that is normalising, children (Tesar, 2016; see also Castañeda, 2015).

The anthropologist and postcolonial scholar Fabian (2014) described similar processes as a time distancing. The concept of ‘denial of coevalness’ or ‘allochronism’ describes the act of placing those spatiotemporally distant Others in another time or other (and lower) stages of development than in the present of those who make the temporal typologising (Fabian, 2014: 32). These temporal modes of typologising, measuring, and hierarchising have historically been used in anthropological depictions of the colonial objectified Others as delayed and backwards compared to the civilised European enlightened white male subject (Fabian, 2014; James, 2011; McClintock, 1995). As the postcolonial feminist scholar Anne McClintock notes (1995), not only were those in the colonies but also the ‘dangerous classes’ in the European metropolis portrayed in these ways in terms of morality and knowledgeability (see also Fahlgren, 2009). Thus, these narratives were, in their starting points, modelled against the racialised, gendered, disabled, and poor child-like Others as presumed national threats implying regression, degeneration, and developmental delay (Fabian, 2014; Goldberg, 1993; McClintock, 1995; Woodhead, 1999). Hence, advocacy for social change, liberation, and ‘claims to development’ (Burman, 2017: 11) has historically been used in processes where the modern civilises the unmodern and the progressive makes the Others equal and saves them from various harms of their own making or their own ‘humankind’. In some cases, temporal othering denotes a presumed being out of (developmental) time altogether and, hence, being permanently underdeveloped.

Similar to anthropology, social work has historically focused on the Other. With its history of philanthropy and eugenics (Burman, 2017; Pettersson, 2001), the focus has been either on the presumptive Other or the Other that has already fallen outside the norm (Mulinari, 2009; Parton, 1996). It also means that the abnormal is to be normalised (again) and the deviating are to be corrected (Fahlgren, 2009; e.g. Woodhead, 1999). Furthermore, linear temporalities and, in particular, developmentalism have been dominant in child welfare and studies on children and childhoods. They are fundamental to and according to some even unavoidable in social work and child welfare (Fahlgren, 2009; White, 1998). According to Fahlgren (2009), linear temporality, while coexisting with other temporalities (see also White, 1998), is an inescapable temporal order in social work because it gives social work its legitimacy. One reason for this may be that social work and child welfare, besides being influenced by developmental psychology, are committed to social change and social justice (International Federation of Social Workers, 2014; Parton, 1996; Pettersson, 2001).

Therborn (2003) contests the idea of a single, that is monolithic modernity. He describes multiple modernities that are constitutive of equally multiple and entangled grand narratives ‘each constituting a variant of the modern conception of time’ (Therborn, 2003: 297). However, the two grand narratives of modernity and, more specifically, of emancipation and progress that I identify as important to consider for the context under study—the conception of societal change in child welfare social work—both imply a future-oriented improvement, that is linear, progressive temporality (Fahlgren, 2009). Thus, the ideas deriving both from the developmental theory, informed by Spencerian progress, and the Marxian emancipation stories, traceable to the Enlightenment, foreground linearity, futurity, and progressivity (Burman, 2017; Castañeda, 2002; Halberstam, 2005).

Due to the aforementioned legacies and ideas, social justice and equality ideals are informed by a linear progressive temporality and the belief that social change happens over time. Such values are often presented as if they have already been accomplished and are commonly associated with what are considered progressive policies of modern nation-states, among which Sweden is exemplary. Put differently, the presumed progressive nature of current times often implies denials of injustice in the present. Injustices are instead often ascribed to past times or othered groups and geographical locations associated with these times of the past (Eliassi, 2017). Othering becomes in this sense a perpetual exposure for intervention for some, without (right or poor) timings. In the analysis below, I nevertheless approach child welfare interventions as a matter of differentiated timings to provide a more nuanced perspective on processes of othering.

Time as a ‘vulnerability factor’

In order for a child to be protected with a compulsory out-of-home placement as measure, the investigator needs to state risks for the child’s health and development (Care of Young Persons Act, 1990: 52). As previously argued, this focus on health and development of children makes certain embodied vulnerabilities more recognisable than others. Physical injury, developmental damage, and ‘psychosomatically suffering’ children are often foregrounded (Knezevic, 2020a: 235; Linell, 2017; Östberg, 2010). I argue that time is essential for some of these signs to become visible. However, the elapse of time is also that which causes even more harm to the child. In this way, developmentalism and psychobiologism are self-reproducing (Knezevic, 2020b).

The expression ‘there is a time and place for everything’ (Halberstam, 2005: 7) resembles the logics of the child welfare assessments of children that are guided by the prescribed timings of development, that is stages (Woodhead, 1999). This suggests a parallel between timings of child welfare interventions and the untimely, that is developmentally deviating, bodies and minds of children. While young age may be a vulnerability in itself (White, 1998), age figures as a background mode of measuring children’s deviation from stages of development.

The lessons from postcolonial scholarship and critical childhood studies alike are that such assessments are based on a particular temporal politics, which relies upon othering and dehumanised temporal markers (Fabian, 2014). Moreover, a developmentalist scheme of thought deprives children of their own childhoods (James, 2011), and what might be seen as their ‘lived’ or ‘subjective time’ (e.g. Fahlgren, 2009; White, 1998) is constructed as a generic all-encompassing, universal developmentalism. Hence, assessments of deviations from developmental timelines, be it precociousness or immaturity and delay, would suggest a time distancing, in Fabian’s words, a ‘denial of coevalness’ or ‘allochronism’ that places the assessed children in other times and stages (2014: 32).

This section serves to give an introductory glimpse of situations where child welfare assessments have been going on for long periods, hence where recommended interventions are not immediate. The point of this section is to show that time distancing can take different forms. While the assessed length of a problem is informing all cases discussed below, the grounds for a care order application still point in somewhat different temporal directions.

(Social) change in developmental times? Uneven timings, changeabilities, and time allocations

Another central element of the assessments is parents’ potential for change [sv. förändringsbenägenhet]. Below, I refer to this as assessments of changeability, arguing that such an assessment involves temporal dimensions. I discuss conceptions of changeability as related to wider conceptions of social change, which, as I argue below and in the context under study, seem rather limited to the time allocated to individuals to improve (see also Roberts, 2017).

Conclusion

Taking the idea that it is hard to generally pinpoint a right time and place for an intervention as a starting point, I do not prescribe early intervention, nor am I against intervention as such. The point of this study was rather to discuss the contemporary temporal discourses of child welfare and timing as a useful notion to capture differentiations and othering within child welfare practice. In this study, the notion of timing links to the idea of being inside or outside (normative) time, and the normative timelines, in turn, are juxtaposed with timings of child welfare interventions.

Although having been contested, developmentalism still has interpretative authority over childhoods around the world (Burman, 2017; White, 1998; Woodhead, 1999). In this article, I argue that child welfare case reports are informed by developmentalism. Care order applications and consequently interventions may take place when children or parents are positioned out of developmental time or at odds with progressive developmental trajectories. This is visible when the subject of assessment is placed at a lower stage of development in which he or she is furthermore seen as stagnant.

In this article, I discuss how assessments of parents’ changeability and if problematic situations are deemed temporary or permanent have significance for timings of protection of children (White, 1998). Yet, the analytical discernments between longevity, futurity, fixity, and chronicity exemplify variations in understandings of the permanent. Longevity, or a presence of problems ‘over time’, and children’s low age point to time being a vulnerability factor in itself. In this way, significant risks are also discussed in care order applications without visible signs of physical and developmental damage. I argue that all these scenarios, commonly linked to an early intervention discourse and ideas about intergenerational transmissions of ‘ACEs’, still show that deviations from the developmental line are crucial if not in present times then in the future, in terms of prospective deviations and psychosomatic problems.

I have also discussed the temporal logics at play when social workers assess problems as permanent, yet predominately without employing analyses of power or understanding violence as structural (Hearn, 1998; e.g. Marshall et al., 2011; Pringle, 2016). In this differentiation, two conceptions of permanency are present. Permanency, as in chronicity, links to parents’ medical/psychiatric diagnoses that are understood as inabilities to change to improved states or stages. This suggests that developmental temporality informs the assessments of parents too. In addition, a developmentalist lens informs understandings of what causes (social) problems and consequentially, social change. As discussed, the assessment of harm and (social) change entails temporal dimensions that besides temporal marking of children and parents lead to an uneven distribution of time granted to the different families in order for them to change and, consequently, differentiated timings of care order applications. While some are assessed less liable to change, others only become so after years passing. Change, hence, seems observable when linked to parents’ changeability or when equated with parents accepting the services at disposal—not in assessments of the services’ usefulness (Fahlgren, 2009).

The cases above all illustrate the limitations of the child welfare practice in addressing problems as structural and systematic. When a situation is deemed problematic enough for an intervention to take place in relation to the observed failures to improve, change evokes neoliberal logics and is reduced to individual potentials. This suggests that the prevailing conceptions of social problems other than those linked to diagnoses require long periods of observation to be seen as systematic and repeating. While structural and systematic problems are repeating over time, it is not (the observation of) their repetition per se that labels them as such in the social theory. Instead, specific issues such as violence, migration, and poverty are labelled as structural and power related from the start (Hearn, 1998; Pringle, 2016). Corresponding issues, however, are here instead made into individual problems and the problems of individuals, or individual pathologies. Thus, these problems are not addressed as structural. Not even over time. As argued, developmentalism, with its tight link to neoliberalism, transforms social problems and constitutes a shift in responsibilisation from the societal/structural to the individual. For instance, what could have been identified as gender-based violence against a mother and a child becomes the mothers’ neglect of her child when assessed ‘over time’. This, furthermore, legitimises an intervention, while simultaneously reducing responsibilisation for institutional failures to detect problems in the past.

This also touches upon differentiations based on complex intersections of able-bodiedness/health status with migration status/race, class, and gender, here discussed in relation to parenting. From such a point of view, timing of protection is a matter of who is assessed. Put differently, there is a tight interlinkage between uneven timings of intervention and the temporally marked and differentiated subjects of assessments.

The central questions raised in critical analyses of temporality are how to move beyond developmentalism and what the alternative to the developmentalist and linear temporality is in the first place (Burman, 2017; Castañeda, 2015; Juhila et al., 2015; Tesar, 2016). Cyclical and punctual-based rather than duration and rate-based time is discussed as an alternative to the linear time of clocks and ‘climax’ (Geertz, 1973: 391–404). Thus, ‘lived time’, that is time ‘embedded into human existence and bound to the life cycle’ is discussed (White, 1998: 57). Drawing on Adam, Fahlgren emphasises the importance of something similar: a subjective and embodied temporality that she calls ‘the time of the mindful body’ (2009: 211, 221–224). Juhila and colleagues ask ‘[i]s a progressive future, in the sense of an ascendant pathway, possible and relevant in every situation?’ (2015: 23). Tesar discusses ‘perpetual childhood’ as an escape from developmentalism (2016: 402), while Halberstam (2005) emphasises ‘queer time’ as a disturbance to heteronormative succession and linearity. This study is not an effort to go beyond developmentalism as much as an attempt to find a modest way of manoeuvring its presumed importance. Approaching time as allocated suggests that the start of a child welfare intervention is rather blurred. Even though the notion of timing marks the point in time in which intervention occurs, whether it occurs after days or years, viewing time as allocated shifts the focus to the point of assessment where the investigator assess the parent’s prospects to bring about change. An inscription of the societal into allocated time would be another way of seeing non-compulsory intervention, that is as allocating time for improvements which are greater than expectations reduced to improvement of behaviours and attitudes of individuals. It would take into account professionals’ agency, authority, and distributional power of welfare resources, including control over clients’ (life)times. However, this requires major changes and perhaps other times.